Recent News

Riotchunhas shared on the forumsÂ what we can expect fromÂ Patch 4.9 in terms of balance.

Hi guys, here is Chun with 4.9 Patch Forecast, where I’ll be talking about the major issues we’re looking at in League of Legends. Keep in mind that the forecast is more about identifying problems that we’re looking at, and not promises of changes to come in each patch. Some changes might take longer than others!

As Jag mentioned in last forecast (http://community.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/live-gameplay/gTkfbmI6-48-live-gameplay-patch-forecastÂ ), we have been working on Khaâ€™Zix. Currently Khaâ€™Zix is being played and built like a brute-force fighter who can initiate a team fight while also being able to survive to clean it up. Assassins in League need to rely on fighters or tanks to initiate fights before they take the opportunity to engage, but Kha’Zix is able to do it all by himself, which gives him a lot of free power. We’re looking at highlighting Kha’Zix’s assassin powers over his fighter abilities.

As a side goal, some of Kha’Zix’s evolutions are really powerful and certain ones are really weak (hello W), so we want to make all 4 of his evolutions compete with each other (maybe not equally, but situationally), so you can choose the evolution to adapt what you need it in certain phases of games.

As a rework follow up, we’ve been keeping track of Kassadin as he continues to become a more and more dominant force. We think we released Kassadin in a good state but then gave him a little too much strength as we saw players struggling with the new kit. The buffs taught players how to play the updated Kass, so we’re peeling back the layers we added to get him back to a correct power level.

Kayle right now is being played as an AP-scaling supportive mobile ADC because of her consistent burst, her high ramping damage and her high utility. What this also does is give her very few weaknesses as she can shred everyone in the fight while staying just out of range to use her Intervention on a teammate. We’re looking at ways to give Kayle some real weaknesses to compensate for her high strengths so she needs to think about how she gets into the fray.

As mentioned in 4.7 forecast, we’re continuing to look into LeBlanc. Some of the things we like about LeBlanc are her high precision, her skill requirements, and her trickiness. Unfortunately she’s doing all of this along with having crazy high burst damage without any counterplay for the enemy. LeBlanc has so much damage that in competitive play she doesnâ€™t even need a Deathfire Grasp to burst down enemies (and DFG is potentially overboard at doing this). This tells us that LeBlanc is scaling very well (too well?) as a burst champion, and we’re trying to find a way to balance her tricky / precise burst while making her fair to play against.

As a follow -up to a newly released champion, Braum is a little too powerful at this point. We are happy with what he can do for his team in team fights as a shield man, but meanwhile he is getting very tanky too quickly and he’s a strong lane bully at same time. When we release champions we have to think about how players will get used to their playstyle, but people were mastering Braum very quickly so we’re keeping an eye on his performance across all levels of play.

Grand Skyfall was always intended to be a high risk, high reward – a high damage global ability that’s inconsistent. We’ve never been a fan of Pantheon’s ability to cast spells while landing (which made his ult very reliable), but as he’s gotten more into the spotlight, we finally decided to make the fix (and then forgot to document it, which was a big mistake). Either way, we’ve fixed the bug with Pantheon’s ult where he could be affected by AoE abilities before he lands, but we’re still trying to find a good way to make Grand Skyfall feel good to use without directly buffing its power levels (Pantheon has actually been pretty stable from some of our internal statistics).

We have bigger plans for the jungle, but currently we’re seeing problems where junglers are getting really far ahead of the game, especially if they have a strong start. We think it might have to do with lane EXP versus monster EXP, as lane minion EXP doesn’t scale with average champion level, but jungle monster EXP does. Basically a snowballing jungler gets his teammates some kills, they get levels and bring up the average level of the game, and then the jungler gets even more experience as he clears camps for additional rewards. No other lanes get this kind of bonus, and we’ve always been aware of strong junglers controlling the pace of the game, so we’re looking for ways to tone that down.

Q: Isn’t the lowerÂ Jungle XPÂ a nerf toÂ tanky support junglers, who are alreadyÂ weak in the current meta?

Â SmashGizmo:Â I get your concern here and just wanted to offer up a couple responses.

The first is that while it’s true that this will also be a slight nerf to jungle support tanks, the relative nerf is much lighter on them than it is on fighter/assassin junglers. Basically, this XP scaling ramped up as the game ramped up, meaning that it has a very minimal impact on the first 6 levels of the game and was mostly impacting the XP from camps in the mid to late game. During these later phases of the game, not only are Tanks slower at dedicated jungle farming, but they’re also spending more time ganking, assisting lanes, and donating camps to teammates than their damage dealing counterparts. So all in all, yes, their strength is slightly lower from this change than it was prior to this change, but they lost much less than the class that they are trying to compete with and thus get relatively stronger (slightly).

The second response I’ll offer up is that we’re still working on larger jungle projects aimed more directly at bringing Tank junglers back up to par with Fighters/Assassins. The change for XP in this patch is merely a response to a problematic trend we’re seeing, it’s not nearly large enough scale to be aimed at solving the larger issues that are causing Tanks to suffer in the Season 4 jungle. As I said above, I believe the net result of this change is a small relative benefit for Tank junglers, but this change is not aimed at the problem you’re stating and rather, we have a larger on-going project that is working towards the issues you’re seeing.

Q: Do you think these changes will solve the current issues withÂ LeBlanc and Kayle?

Â RiotChun:Â At this point, we are just doing experimental changes to LeBlanc/Kayle and there is a good chance that we will not release those changes for 4.9.

To be more specific, I personally believe LeBlanc’s damage is a little too high as she has above-average base damage and very-high AP ratio (3.7 ap ratio for a QRWE combo -_-). Changing the Mimic damage is a good direction to try but we are still trying to find a way to balance her tricky / precise burst while making her fair to play against as I mentioned in the OP.

For Kayle, it is not the case you are afraid of. There are high strengths of Kayle and she just needs some real weaknesses. Range reduction would be effective but we are still exploring.

Chat restriction has been a hot topic this week, with thousands of players expressing confusion as to why they were suddenly punished. Ymir steps on the forums to clear some of the misconceptions about labeling people “toxic” in-game.

RelevantÂ Red Post Collection

Q: Why are you chat restricting people who flame with the intention of showing a teammate what they did wrong?

Â Â Ymir:Â What we want is to let you know other people don’t like playing with someone who is a constant critic. You’re not actually improving the game or the individual and that means anything you type is entirely negative.

If you can just let your flame end at your fingertips then, like the vast majority of players, you’ll be 100% fine and never experience a Chat Restriction or anything else.

Q: What should we do if we’re not allowed to critique a bad player / intentional troll ?

Â Â Ymir:Â What I wouldn’t do is get down to his level because there are still eight other people in the game who want to play the game and getting into a fight with someone who quite obviously isn’t thinking straight or is just confused is always a recipe for a disaster.

It’s quite obvious that dude made a bad call and is probably more angry with himself than with you.

I’d mute the guy and encourage the rest of my team before dropping a report. It doesn’t need to be an extreme and most people who play League of Legends have never encountered any form of punishment or warning. They constantly give advice, but they’re not critical in the way I tend to see people talking about their restrictions here are.Â

If you’re using words like flame or witty to describe your critiques then you’re looking to own someone and not make them better players and that is a key difference.

How do Chat Restrictions work?

Â Ymir:Â Chat Restrictions actually have a lot going on, a misconception I’ve seen here is that it’s simply a set number of reports = punishment. There is more to it than that and you don’t have to worry about that guy who reports everyone because the system is elegant enough to pick it up.

The reason some of the higher numbers of both people with these and also 40+ games is down to the Tribunal changes and not the everyday system. We may have more going on with that in the future so we may not be done with waves just yet. One thing we can’t do and it’s a bit of a pickle for us is go into depth about numbers and levels of the system as if we talk too much about it the effectiveness is lessened as people attempt to game the system.

This has always been the case in any Player Behaviour initiative and it sucks because where we need transparency we can’t bring it as it has the potential to break things. This is far from just a Riot concern.

The main thing with Chat Restrictions is they are fast and have been in game for close to a year now. They are not a new feature and they’re pretty much proven through speed of action and having players think about where they allocate their communication to educate and make rapid improvements. Which has long been a request and long been a goal of ours.

We’re constantly monitoring this and one thing we have most definitely not seen in Chat restriction experiments is that they cause games to be lost. What we have seen is people with Chat Restrictions receiving less reports and improvement that makes the game a far better experience.

Q: Isn’t going alone in fights a sign of intentional trolling?

Â Â Ymir:Â As someone who everyone in the office can vouch does this with some regularity it isn’t about ruining the game it’s a weird barbarian complex where the opportunity for something epic is dangled like a carrot and I can’t help but chase it.

‘YMIR NO!’ Is a common shout on Skype or across the office.

Sometimes it pays off and I cackle madly, sometimes I get my ass kicked. The main point is the followthrough on this, I’ll never blame anyone else and I’ll make sure that if I’m in a game with strangers I halt myself from going too crazy. That said I have sympathy for people who make a questionable play, they’re genuinely not trolling to them at that time and on their screen they saw a BIG PLAY and tried to take it.

Whether it’s inexperience, greed, bloodlust or Teemo Hate something drove them to do it beyond trolling or feeding. A reaction against the rest of the team afterwards is them venting at themselves most of the time and the key thing there is not to engage on it as it just gives them an outlet to continue venting.

Q: Have you ever considered adding a self-chat-restriction buttons for players who can’t control themselves?

Â Â Ymir:Â This is an interesting one.

What we found was that actually allowing players to mute themselves did not have any real effect, or the potential for effect. It became a crutch and they didn’t actually learn what they were saying was wrong. If you do this then it becomes a system where any change is reliant upon tools to change whereas the system now puts it on you to change.

For very few people it may work, but for most it’s an option that doesn’t really work out the way it should and if they need a Chat Restriction they’ll end up with one through the system.

League of Legends will be getting a new sound engine in a few patches time. Senior Sound Designer BelligerentSwan has stepped on the forums to answer community questions regarding the upcoming feature.

Reporting bugs with the new audio engine

Â Â BelligerentSwan:Â As always, if you find a bug (with the current or new audio engeine) let us know! If it is an audio specific issue, feel free to report them directly on theÂ Audio Section, or for general issues theÂ Bug Reports Section. Also, if you have a PBE account, stay on the lookout for periodic PBE tests where the engine will be activated.

Q: Will this allow me toÂ mute character voices without muting the entire game’s sound?

Â Â BelligerentSwan:Â You can currently do this already! When in game, open the settings menu, select sounds, and click the small speaker icon at the end of the “Voice Volume” slider to mute the in-game voices.

Q: Will the new audio engine be supported by Windows XP?

Â Â BelligerentSwan:Â If you can run the game, you shouldn’t have an issue with this new audio engine! If you run into any problems though, feel free to report them over in theÂ Audio FeedbackÂ section, or theÂ Bug ReportsÂ section.

Q: If you are in fact aiming for the camera being the listener, as we were told here,Â then why not just put the microphone at the camera?

Â Â BelligerentSwan:Â This was actually more involved than just moving the listener (microphone). When you move the listener, it affects all the sound levels in game. It has a big impact on how things sound at a specific distance based on your current position. We essentially had to go back in an re-mix all the content to match this new position without having a negative impact on the gameplay feedback that sounds deliver. However, fixing the listener was just one part of the changes with the New Audio Engine, and not the only reason we are changing Audio Engines.

Q: Will the new engine fix the delay in voice responses when emotes are requested?

Â Â BelligerentSwan:Â For some VO that is processed (added effects to make it sound a certain way like Thresh, Blackfrost Anivia, Lissandra, etc…), they will usually have long “tails” where the sound might not be immediately audible in some cases, but has reverb or something that adds to the overall quality of the VO. You are correct in the fact that a new line of VO won’t trigger in some instances if a previous VO line is already playing.

Q: Will we be able to change the language pack without messing with the game files?

Â Â BelligerentSwan:Â We won’t be changing anything regarding how you select the language packs.

Q: Will the new engine have an option to lower both Champion Select sound and in-game sound at once?

Â Â BelligerentSwan:Â The New Audio Engine is separate from the champ select screen. You can adjust these volumes separately. For Champ Select music, I believe you can select the Gear looking icon in the upper right corner and adjust the sfx and music volume there. For in game sounds/music/voices, open the opens menu in-game, and select the Sound page.

Q: Is Irelia’s rework stillÂ underway?

Â Â Morello:Â Irelia would be easier than Soraka – but I think we gotta stare down Sion and Poppy before that 🙂

Q: Is Soraka’s ultimateÂ in need of changes?

Â Â Morello: We actually like Wish, it’s one of the most strategically good spells she has.

Q: Any chance you can update Taric’s visuals?

Â Â Morello:Â I don’t think Taric’s in the immediate priority, but we agree he’s on the “ugh” list of badness. 🙂 I’d have to ask artists on their thoughts of VU and how that relates to gameplay update.

In this case, we’d be waiting to add Gameplay until a VU, since we can easily piggyback on the new VFX and animations (which lets us release more reworks when we do this!)

Â RiotNurseFlan:Â Oh dear, water shortage crisis!The water particles should be there on Koi Nami, thanks for pointing it out :]

Q: Do you plan on updating older Legendary skins to the quality of current ones?

Â Riot JxE:Â I think they will definitely consider it, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t know if they’ll do it or not, because there’s a lot of variables and trade-offs that go in to making these decisions.

Q: Why was I Chat Restricted?

Â Riot Moonleaf:Â We have pre-announced that chat restrictions are comingÂ here. If you want more information on why your account received a chat restriction please send a ticket toÂ SupportÂ and the Support team will provide more information. Obviously we can’t discuss account details over the forum.

Kha’Zix is too tanky in teamfights for how well he deals with priority targets and this is something the balance team will address.Â Evolutions will also be evened out so all 4 are viable options and dependent on the flow of the match.

Kassadin was buffed in response to players struggling to counter his kit. Now that they’ve adapted, his power will be toned down a bit.

Kayle is currently lacking big weaknesses, while bringing a lot of up-front damage and utility for her team. The team is exploring ways of adding counterplay to her kit.

LeBlanc‘s damage is simply too high for the amount of mobility and utility she brings in high-level play. This will be nerfed in an upcoming patch.

Braum is currently becoming too tanky with little effort. The team is still monitoring his performance.

With Pantheon‘s recent bugfixÂ leaving his ultimate severely weakened, the team is exploring ways to make Grand Skyfall feel satisfying while maintaining its high-risk global skill factor.

Jungle XP currently scales with average Champion level, which meansÂ snowballing junglers can greatly pull ahead in terms of XP on the map. Experience from monster camps in the mid- and late- game is going down significantly.

2. YmirÂ has answered some of the community’s concerns regarding the recent chat restriction wave. Recommend you read through it if you’ve been affected or you’re just interested to see how this punishment is distributed.

3. Morello has confirmed Soraka‘s ultimate is in a good place and that long-cooldown heals are a fun mechanic in League.